Cisco CTO: Internet Of Everything Much More Than SDN

When Cisco announced strong earnings during its most recent fiscal quarter, much of the progress was attributed to the networking giant's strides in software-defined networking (SDN).

SDN technology broadly eliminates manual management of switches and other networking hardware by abstracting control to a single administrative console. Such networks factor into many of the IT world's most impactful movements, such as virtualization and cloud computing, but according to Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior, SDN is a constraining concept that falls short of the company's more ambitious vision: an intelligent, programmable network that will not only link billions of devices to the Internet but also, thanks to the data mining the network enables, inject trillions of dollars into the global economy.

This bold forecast is rooted in converging technologies, starting with the explosion of everyday objects, from utility meters to iPads, that are now equipped not only to access the Internet but also, thanks to the availability of low-cost sensors, to collect data on an unprecedented scale. These connected devices populate the so-called Internet of Things and Cisco anticipates these objects will see 400% growth over the next few years, totaling 50 billion by 2020. The company has defined IoE as "the network and processes that both unite the objects and supply the analytical muscle to make the collected data useful."

During the interview, Warrior stated that "the future will be about a programmable network that is much broader than SDN." She elaborated that captured data can't be sent en mass to the data center, and that network intelligence, be it at the edge of the network or at the endpoint itself, must negotiate when to crunch numbers locally and when to transmit content elsewhere. This model of distributed networking will, in Cisco's view, involve open APIs along with a new wave of apps that can recognize how the network is architected.

These changes don't necessarily mean that existing infrastructure will need to be replaced. Cisco futurist Dave Evans has suggested that many of IoE's biggest potential benefits, such as near-universal access to healthcare and education, will arise not from futuristic new devices but rather from the simple addition of radios and sensors to many of the objects we already use; a smart bathroom mirror, for example, could be central to extending human lifetimes by decades and perhaps even centuries. Similarly, Warrior said that Cisco's installed user base, which has invested $180 billion in the company's gear, will be able to join the Internet of Everything by exposing existing hardware to open APIs.

"For applications to be aware of the network, you need to create programmability at different levels," she said. "But people are not going to throw away their existing install base and go to something completely new. That would mean huge amounts of capital, and we all know IT budgets are constrained."

Customers will be able to utilize these APIs with Cisco's One Platform Kit, which includes hundreds of APIs. The company's ASICs, the integrated circuits inside routers and switches, will also deliver programmability.

Yeah, I have no idea if $14.4 trillion is a reasonable number, but I have little trouble believing that many trillions of dollars are at stake. Cisco's own research abstractly assigns $3 trillion of the total to "innovation," which injects a margin for error into the figure, without even looking at the other $11 trillion+. I don't know if the Internet of Everything will be the revolution Cisco's anticipating-- but even if the IoE disappoints, it should still a force to be reckoned with.

The industrial uses get pretty persuasive in a hurry, though -- connected machines where you can measure the ROI from monitor-and-analyze uses in uptime, reduced maintenance costs. I have no sense of whether that adds up to $14 trillion, but it is real cash flow savings.

Cisco will have an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to open standards as the industry works out the northbound API on SDN/network virtualization controllers. Cisco certainly has the market clout to go proprietary here, so we'll see what happens.

It is hard to shake the feeling that this $14.4 trillion Internet of Everything is more wishful thinking than reality.I've been hearing about Internet-connected washing machines for years but have yet to meet anybody who wants one or is wlling to pay for one. Paul Travis, InformationWeekcom

Enterprise cloud adoption has evolved to the point where hybrid public/private cloud designs and use of multiple providers is common. Who among us has mastered provisioning resources in different clouds; allocating the right resources to each application; assigning applications to the "best" cloud provider based on performance or reliability requirements.